Of the three, the gigabit data rate connection (802.11ac) to homes is particularly important for the electronics industry, Samueli said in an interview here with EE Times. “It changes the game” for carriers, systems and home networks. “Gigabit-to-the-home is a no-brainer. DOCSIS 3.0 is ready, and it will proliferate within the next three years,” he said. Gigabit data rates in a home network are also being transported via Ethernet, power lines, gigabit Wi-Fi and MoCA, he added.

“While we are still far from enabling gigabit wireless on clients' [handhelds],” Samueli said it would eventually have an impact on how chips inside a handset are partitioned.

Samueli also predicted that the gigabit connection could move some of the processing to the cloud, be it graphics rendering or display processing currently executed in a client’s CPU. That could prompt industry to redefine what handset CPUs should do. As for chip companies racing to add more processing cores to handhelds, Samueli said, “My view is we may be overdoing the CPU war."

Following is an excerpt of our conversation with Samueli during CES.

Henry Samueli, co-founder, CTO of Broadcom.

EE Times: Have you had much chance to look around the show floor yet?

Samueli: I had just about one hour Tuesday (Jan. 8).

EE Times: Please name the three hottest things at the show this year.

Samueli: First and foremost, I found Ultra HDTV (UHDTV) to be the highlight of the entire CES this year. It is significant. I think this year’s show let people see a glimpse of the future.

EE Times: Could you explain why almost every UHDTV demo on the show floor was about snow-covered mountains, Swiss villages and lazy rivers meandering through green valleys? I saw only one video clip showing a soccer match, in which the images of players were crisp but the movement of the ball strangely a little jerky.

Samueli: [laughs] It’s probably because the demo is using footage based on 24 frames per second. You need 60 frames per second to show fast moving action in sports on 4k x 2k TV. The bit rate to screen is not fast enough either. Current HDMI cable handles only 24 frames per second.

Of course they do. They won't give us any faster internet until they are ready for it. I'm sure it is already possible to provide much faster connection. But they wait. Who can tell what they are waiting for? As for the standards, they set it, for sure. All together. travel insurance for EU residents

Frank, while what you describe is theoretically true, I don't think it's the wave of the future. The idea of people setting up home servers to send around massive files between computers in the home was never a big hit, and is becoming less so.
This kind of file transfer is going to "the cloud," as current lingo calls it. So in fact, your last mile connection is where the action is, rather than the home network. And any IoT appliances in the home, that may actually remain within the home network, are likely to be noise level in terms of bit rate.
As TV migrates to the Internet, this will be even more true. Multiple people watching different TV programs will result in multiple high bit rate streams from "prime time anytime" web servers, through the broadband link, then through the home network, rather than from any sort of centralized in-home PVRs.

I remember when Kodak first came out with its flat grain Ectar 25 negative film. Even though theoretically "no one" would appreciate the improvement, in 4 X 6 prints, over previous negative films, the improvement was obvious. An image so smooth that you'd swear the film's emulsion was liquid.
Same deal here. People were saying that HDTV was unnecessary. And yet, even on not-so-large screens, it's gorgeous. With UHD, you can get a little closer to your normal size TV set, and still see a beautifully smooth image.
The eye/brain system is complicated. Even if first order approximations imply that "no one" will notice the difference, your brain will inform otherwise. Just look at the way people gush over "retina displays," on very small screens. These have a greater pixel count than 1080p.
What especially appeals to me about UHD is that codec improvements since the introduction of HDTV should make UHD require little or no more channel capacity than HDTV. So it should actually be practical and doable. As opposed to being a bandwidth hog.

"unless you have an extremely large TV..." is part of the answer. The other part is, as tb1 says below, the "immersive experience." I expect average screen size as well as resolution to continue to increase, subject to the usual caveats about the economic sweet spots. Not many consumers will pay $20k for a huge UHDTV display, but millions will pay $2K for such a display. The same applies to your comment about bandwidth. As long as there is insatiable demand for more bandwidth, there are profits to be made in finding ways to provide more bandwidth.
It is the nature of our business to make things better & cheaper over time, and the main issue is rarely "if," but rather "when."

One of the things I find interesting about this article is the number of times he said something to the effect of "the standard is already here." It wasn't that long ago when the products more often preceded the final standard. 802.11n was that way. If I remember correctly a was also. Are companies getting smarter about getting together on standards early on? Or are some of these future standards wishful thinking that will need a lot of modifications when the implementation technology is available?

Dear Junko - thank you for another informative interview. Dr. Samueli's comment that a war on number of compute cores (processor compute power)may be overblown is interesting -- from a company that is a master on very large (MIPS) cores in networking....
Perhaps you could have asked two more pertinent questions:
1. MIPS versus ARM cores - BRCM just purchased architectural licenses for 32- and 64-bit cores ("real men fine-tune standard ARM cores") -- any trends?
2. BRCM is the king of wireless connectivity Combos. Top-2 is Qualcomm and Qualcomm, while still have a Combo IC (RF radio portions, integrates digital portion of connectivity into processor.... for a variety of well detailed specific reasons. Qualcomm is the king of baseband processors, of course. Any thoughts on that ftom BRCM's CTO?
Many thanks in advance if you could follow-up on the above - as you did with your Rockchip interview.
And -- HNY Junko!